Rachel Syme

From the daily newsletter: at ninety-two, Burnett is as sharp and funny as ever.

The ninety-two-year-old comedy legend has influenced generations of performers. In a string of recent TV roles, she has been co-starring with some of her closest comedic heirs.

Also: Julio Torres’s “Color Theories,” Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s paintings of bondage, Rachel Syme’s stylish movie picks, and more.

With her new album, “Something Beautiful,” the pop star finally has material worthy of her instrument.

Also: the skateboarding play “Bowl EP,” the off-kilter divas Grace Jones and Janelle Monae; Jamie Lee Curtis’s early “Love Letters,” and more.

From the daily newsletter: a look at the new season of “And Just Like That . . .” Plus: Susan B. Glasser on Elon Musk’s exit; and are the best flour tortillas made in Kansas City?

The article, about the launch of a new perfume, treats what might be considered a frivolous subject with exhaustive attention.

Also: Rachel Syme on the latest in charms, the Chicago rapper Saba, turtle races in Bed-Stuy, Caspar David Friedrich paired with Schumann, and more.

Her new album is a work of self-citation, rummaging around in Gaga’s own past for inspiration. It’s also, somehow, the freshest collection of songs she has released in years.

Plus: Photographs of labor and solidarity at I.C.P., the Roots bring jazz rap to the Blue Note, the unstoppable Twyla Tharp, and more.

From the daily newsletter: making it as an Everyman. Plus: Graham Norton, comedy butler to the stars; a political scientist on Israel’s widening war; and Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance for the ages.

TV’s preëminent office guy has never worked a “regular nine-to-five,” but his years as a struggling actor taught him what it’s like to toil anonymously.

An annual roundup of things to make life a bit sparklier, a bit easier, or just a bit sillier.

Also: The appalling betrayals of “The Apprentice,” a cabaret convention, a Bay Ridge dive bar, and more.

From the daily newsletter: the Internet’s favorite perfume; the end of adoptions from China; and when pets and politics collide.

Francis Kurkdjian had a runaway hit with Baccarat Rouge 540. Now, at Parfums Christian Dior, he’s trying to make his mark on a storied fashion house.

Also: The influential aesthetic of “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora,” the return of Bright Eyes, the democratic Fall for Dance festival, and more.

She didn’t flee New York, exactly; it was work that first brought her to the U.K. But being in London ultimately offered Dunham the freedom of a place where “you don’t feel that you are being in any way hemmed in by other people’s perceptions,” she said. As many of us recall all too well, “Girls” was, during its six-season run, in the twenty-tens, an inescapable subject of millennial discourse. Dunham, who wrote the pilot when she was just twenty-four, became a controversial and constantly discu…

The film’s director, the seventy-one-year-old Susan Seidelman, directed two of my other favorite films of the eighties—a time when the number of women helming feature films could be counted on one hand. Seidelman grew up in a Philadelphia suburb where, she told me recently, “everyone looked the same.” She attended film school at N.Y.U. and filled her movies with the kinds of fashionable and funky strivers with whom she hung out downtown. Her delightfully scrappy first feature, “Smithereens” (198…

Not all unsuccessful shows, however, are spectacular implosions or paragons of bad taste. There is another, more common, type of Broadway misfire that is less dramatic but perhaps more disappointing—a production that has many things going for it, with a closely collaborative team working furiously until the last moment, never losing faith that it will find an audience. Instead of crashing and burning, it opens and sputters. Some diehard fans adore it, but it becomes apparent—after the first revi…